Born in Poland, Ania Vu (née Vu Dang Minh Anh) is currently a PhD candidate in composition as a Benjamin Franklin Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her recent music explores different notions of time, musical energy related to form, and wordplay in vocal music set to her own text. Her current mentors include Amy Williams, James Primosch and Anna Weesner, and her past teachers include Robert Morris, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Oliver Schneller, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and David Liptak. She completed her BM in 2017 with distinction, double-majoring in composition and theory from the Eastman School of Music and minoring in social psychology from the University of Rochester.
Ania is a finalist (2019, 2018) and recipient of an Honorable Mention (2017) from the ASCAP Morton Gould Competition Young Composers Awards, and the Belle Gitleman (2016), Bernard Rodgers (2015), and Louis Lane (2014) awards at Eastman. Performers of her music include the International Contemporary Ensemble, TAK ensemble, and the Iridium Saxophone Quartet. Her music has been featured at festivals such as Red Note New Music Festival in Illinois State University, SoundSCAPE in Cesena, Italy, and Women in Music in Rochester.
Besides composing, Ania is an active piano performer and educator. Her piano teachers include Amy Yang, Vincent Lenti, Irina Rumiancewa-Dabrowski and her mother Hong Anh Dang. She has taken masterclasses with Dang Thai Son, Wojciech Świtała, Andrzej Jasiński, Philippe Giusiano, Katarzyna Popowa-Zydroń, and Mikhail Markoff, to name a few. Ania performs solo and chamber music, classical and contemporary repertoire, works of her own and of her composition peers. As pianist, she won several awards in national and international competitions in Europe, and has performed in the United States, Hungary, Spain, Italy, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Vietnam, and Poland. In 2015, she participated in “Music Inspire Africa”, a program where selected musicians traveled to Zimbabwe and South Africa to expose local students to classical music through performance and teaching.
Outside of music, Ania has a passion for languages, speaking fluently in English, French, Polish, and Vietnamese, and having studied Latin and German. She also enjoys traveling (has visited 30 countries so far), wandering in all kinds of museums, and ballroom dancing.
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